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DISC 2025 Call for Papers
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39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing
October 27th – October 31st, 2025
Berlin, Germany
https://www.disc-conference.org/wp/disc2025/

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DISC Conference Overview
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The International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) is an international forum on the theory, design, analysis, implementation and application of distributed systems and networks. It is organized in cooperation with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). The symposium was established 40 years ago, in 1985, as a biannual International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms on Graphs (WDAG).

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Important Dates
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Paper registration: May 20, 2025
Submission deadline: May 23, 2025
Rebuttal phase: July 7-14, 2025
Notification: August 7, 2025

All deadlines are at 23:59 AoE.

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Scope
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Submissions are sought in all areas of distributed algorithms and distributed systems, including theory, design, implementation, modelling, analysis, and application of distributed systems and networks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Biological and nature-inspired distributed algorithms
- Blockchain protocols
- Coding and reliable communication
- Communication networks: algorithms, protocols, and applications
- Complexity, lower bounds, and impossibility results
- Design and analysis of distributed algorithms
- Distributed and concurrent data structures
- Distributed algorithms for clouds and IoT
- Distributed graph algorithms
- Distributed machine learning and data science
- Distributed operating systems, middleware, database systems
- Distributed resource management
- Fault tolerance, reliability, self-organization, self-stabilization
- Formal methods for distributed computing: verification, synthesis and testing
- Game-theoretic and knowledge-based approaches to distributed computing
- Internet and web applications, social networks and recommendation systems
- Massively-parallel, high-performance, cloud and grid computing
- Mobile agents, autonomous distributed systems, swarm robotics
- Multiprocessor and multi-core architectures and algorithms
- Overlay networks and peer-to-peer networks
- Population protocols and chemical reaction networks
- Quantum distributed algorithms
- Replication, consensus, and consistency
- Security in distributed computing, cryptographic protocols
- Synchronization, persistence and transactional memory
- Wireless, mobile, sensor and ad-hoc networks

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Submissions
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A submitted paper should clearly motivate the importance of the problem being addressed, discuss prior work and its relationship to the paper, explicitly and precisely state the paper’s key contributions, and outline the key technical ideas and methods used to achieve the main claims. A submission should strive to be accessible to a broad audience, as well as having sufficient details for experts in the area.

There are two types of submissions: regular papers and brief announcements. Regular papers must report on original research that has not previously been published (and may not be concurrently submitted to other journals or conferences with proceedings). All ideas necessary for an expert to fully verify the central claims in a paper, including experimental results, should be included in the submission. A brief announcement may describe work in progress or work presented elsewhere. A brief announcement may also present a result that is short and elegant, but does not require a longer paper. It may also be used to announce a software distribution or an experimental result of interest that can be concisely described.

A paper that is not accepted as a regular paper may be invited as a brief announcement.

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Submission format
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Submissions must be in English in pdf format and they must be prepared using the LaTeX style template for LIPIcs (https://submission.dagstuhl.de/series/details/5#author) with

\documentclass[a4paper,anonymous,USenglish]{lipics-v2021}.

Submissions must be anonymous, without any author names, affiliations, or email addresses. The contact information of the authors will be entered separately in the submission metadata.

For regular papers, there is no page limit, and authors are encouraged to use the “full version” of their paper as the submission. The initial 15 pages, excluding the title page and a table of contents, should contain a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of the paper’s importance within the context of prior work and a description of the key technical and conceptual ideas used to achieve its main claims. (Illustrative figures are encouraged.) The submission must contain all necessary details, including full proofs of all claims in the paper.

Although there is no bound on the length of a submission, material other than the first 15 pages, excluding the title page and a table of contents, will be read at the committee’s discretion. Papers submitted as brief announcements should comply with the above rules, replacing 15 pages with 5 pages.

Submissions not conforming to the submission guidelines and papers outside of the scope of the conference will be rejected without consideration.

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Use of Large Language Models (LLMs)
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The use of LLMs for submission preparation is permitted, although it is highly recommended that they only be used for cosmetic changes, e.g. proofreading of the text. The use of LLMs in technical parts should be treated in the same way as any other software or system, and thus carefully described and documented in the submission. Ultimately, the authors are responsible for the content of their submission, and mis-use of LLM may result in rejection. Any questions about the LLM use policy should be directed to the PC chair, Dariusz Kowalski (dkowalski@augusta.edu).

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Anonymous Submissions
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We will use a relaxed implementation of double-blind peer review. Submissions must not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. In particular, authors’ names and affiliation should not appear in the document itself. Authors should ensure that any references to their own related work are in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”). The purpose of this process is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try.

You are free to disseminate your work through arXiv and other online repositories and give presentations on your work as usual. Moreover, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized.

Brief announcements should also be submitted without author names and affiliations so that a reviewer can form an initial judgment without bias, but they can contain a reference to the full version of the work in the bibliography.

Please feel free to ask the PC chair if you have any questions about the double-blind policy of DISC 2025.

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Conflict of Interest
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The submission form provides an opportunity to specify conflicts of interest with any of the PC members and other member of research community. A conflict of interest is limited to the following:

- A family member or close friend;
- A Ph.D. advisor or advisee (no time limit), or postdoctoral or undergraduate mentor or mentee within the past five years;
- A person with the same affiliation;
- A person involved in an alleged incident of harassment;
- Frequent collaborators, or collaborators who have jointly published papers within the last two years.

If you feel that you have a valid reason for a conflict of interest beyond listed above, or any other issues related to the fair treatment of your submission, contact the PC chair, Dariusz Kowalski (dkowalski@augusta.edu), or the SafeTOC representative for DISC, listed at https://safetoc.org/index.php/toc-advisors/.

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Participation at DISC
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It is expected that accepted papers and brief announcements be presented in-person at the conference.

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Publication
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The proceedings will be published by LIPIcs. The final version of the paper has to be formatted following the LIPIcs guidelines. Regular papers will have 15 pages in the final proceedings (excluding references), and brief announcements will have 5 pages in the proceedings (including everything). If more space is needed, the authors are encouraged to post the full version e.g. on arXiv and refer to it in their paper.

Accepted papers and brief announcements must be presented by one of the authors, with a full registration and according to the final schedule.

Extended and revised versions of selected papers will be considered for a special issue of the journal Distributed Computing.

The best paper at DISC will be considered for publication in the Journal of the ACM.

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Awards
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Awards will be given to the best paper and the best student paper. To be eligible for the best student paper award, at least one of the paper authors must be a full-time student at the time of submission, and the student(s) must have made a significant contribution to the paper.